Cool beans stats, MetroMPG. I still insist on a manual transmission but here in the States their numbers are like 5% these days. My Mirage, iA, Soul or Spark, whichever it is and even if it's not until 2019, will have a stick shift tranny, baby.

What could drive me to my local Mitsubishi, Toyota, Kia or Chevrolet dealer sometime in the next three months, though, is our '11 Kia Soul 5-speed only has Warranty service until June 30th, 2016. I don't like that. Anymore, I want a competent Warranty to cover my small car - just in case.

Same here... only* manual transmissions for me! I was thinking about this yesterday: of the 4 sibs in my family, 3 out of 4 have manuals.

* I would make an exception for an EV or hybrid though, and have in the recent past (I had a 2004 Prius for a year). Automatics with those drivetrains are interesting enough with their various regen, coasting modes, start/stop, etc to keep me engaged as a driver.

I have the CVT and much prefer it to a manual. I had never driven a CVT before the Mirage, and I heard horror stories about CVTs in other cars. The Mirage CVT is programmed to work perfectly to suit my driving. In normal driving, it is not difficult to stay under 2000 rpm while accelerating, even up to highway speeds. Of course cruising at highway speed is at much lower rpm than the manual. Then if there is a need for quick acceleration for merging or passing, pressing the pedal to the floor brings 5000 rpm almost immediately and it stays at 5000 rpm to whatever speed you want by changing the gear ratio. Driving the CVT takes some learning though. With a manual transmission, you choose the gear ratio and provide fuel to the engine with the accelerator pedal. With the CVT, the accelerator pedal is essentially a computer input device. Using the position of the pedal, the current speed of the car, the slope of the road, etc. the computer decides what rpm and what gear ratio is appropriate. When you learn what the computer will do under different circumstances, you can provide the right pressure on the pedal to get the result you want.

In the 20 or 30 minutes I drove one in 2014, I still clearly remember being very impressed with the extent the engineers were allowed to go to get good fuel economy. On top of that, the car was much more pleasant and relaxed under light load since the engine RPM always went as low as possible... especially on the hwy.

In Australia manual cars are 13% overall in 2014 compared to 33% in 2000.

I did a check of used 2014 and 2015 Mirages for sale on the most popular car sales website (carsales.com.au). 225 automatic vs. 78 manual, which means that manuals are sitting at about 25%.

For the Volkswagen Polo manuals are around 28%, for the Chevy Spark (which we call the Holden Barina) manuals are around 20%. Nissan Micra manuals are around 25%. So micro cars are generally well above that 13% overall.

These days a lot of larger cars in Australia don't have the manual option.